Language development in children with Down syndrome: lexical acquisition and its relatioship with morphosyntactic development

ABSTRACT/SUMARY

This work falls within a broader work that have as an objective the study of language development in children with Down Syndrome (DS). At this particular stage, we have three objectives related to our findings from earlier research. The first aims to isolate any variables that may help to explain the process of lexical acquisition in DS children. More precisely, we will focus on some of the variables that would seem most relevant at the beginning of lexical development: (1) joint attention and (2) consideration of the socio-pragmatics cues provided by the speaker (mind reading). Our second objective is to study morphosyntactic development in DS children; this is one of the areas in which they encounter greater difficulties and translates into one of these subjects´ severest limitations as regards both personal and social development. Lastly, we intend to analyse the possible relation between lexical and grammatical development in these children. An analysis of this relation is vital in order to determine to what extent grammatical development is interdependent on lexical abilities or if, on the contrary, this is an independent development to a certain degree, which requires specific processes for achievement. Both technical and practical implications that stand out are discussed throughout our work.